There’s promise on the East Side of St. Paul, and people are paying attention.

Work on a vision for its future is grounded in what Ann Mulholland of the St. Paul and Minnesota Community Foundations describes as “powerful data” from Minnesota Compass, a project of Wilder Research. Findings pertain to the portion of the East Side that forms the city’s northeast corner, from Lake Phalen east to the city limits at McKnight Road and between Larpenteur and Minnehaha avenues. There:

Median household income is $43,600. It’s $51,400 for the city as a whole.

50 percent of residents are people in poverty, a figure that’s about 43 percent for all of St. Paul.

42 percent of residents under the age of 5 are in poverty, compared with 32 percent for the entire city.

Virtually all — 99.5 percent — of single-family housing units are valued at $200,000 or less. That price applies to 69 percent of housing units citywide.

Behind the numbers is potential. The area “is young, and that’s an asset,” said Mulholland, a former St. Paul deputy mayor, who highlighted the data in a recent presentation to the Rotary Club of St. Paul. “People are building families on the East Side.”

It’s diverse, with residents who speak many languages. That’s “an opportunity that we haven’t fully seized — and can,” Mulholland said. It’s a point of view that positions language skills and cultural literacy as powerful assets rather than deficiencies to be corrected.

The housing stock on the East Side also is among advantages. Homes are generally affordable and livable, said Mulholland.

The list of assets throughout the East Side also includes what Mulholland describes as a string of “pearls of natural infrastructure”: Phalen Park, Battle Creek Park and the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.

Those scrutinizing the numbers include a coalition of area foundations, the East Side Funders Group. Together, the nearly 20 entities — including foundations, city government and others organizations — want to “crack the nut on how do you really build economic inclusion on the East Side,” Mulholland told us.

The need arises, in part, from the sweeping change the East Side has undergone. Here’s how the Pioneer Press’ Nick Woltman described it in a report last year:

“Sixty years ago, hundreds of shift workers crowded the streets and sidewalks each morning on St. Paul’s East Side. Toting metal lunchboxes and Thermoses full of coffee, most headed to one of three places: Hamm’s, Whirlpool or 3M.

“During their heyday in the 1950s, these companies offered comfortable middle-class lifestyles to their combined workforce of more than 10,000 employees, anchoring a local economic boom that buoyed countless nearby small businesses.”

As manufacturing changes swept the nation by the 1980s, the onetime jobs engine for St. Paul was no more.

Looking to the future, “it may not matter that the jobs are a walk down the street like they used to be with 3M and Whirlpool,” Mulholland told us. It might matter instead “that the folks can get to their jobs effectively and efficiently across the metro region.”

Again, data are useful, pointing to a conclusion that residents on the East Side travel farther to employment than people in the rest of the city.

“That’s an issue. There’s a cost to that for individuals,” Mulholland told us, noting that 35 percent of people on the neighborhood covered in the Minnesota Compass data travel 30 minutes or longer to work, as opposed to 29 percent in the rest of the city.

“More efficiently connecting them to our transit system is critically important,” said Mulholland, who also notes the importance of “training and education that are aligned with the jobs of the future on the East Side.”

Included are programs that will build skills for careers in such fields as health care and technology, and institutions including Metropolitan State University, which she describes as “deeply rooted in the East Side.”

In many parts of the East Side, there are results to be tallied: the St. Paul Port Authority’s Beacon Bluff redevelopment of the former 3M site; development along Phalen Boulevard, the business corridor pieced together with Port Authority leadership from under-used property; the opening three years ago of the East Side Enterprise Center, which provides business development services and access to capital for people working to secure their piece of the American Dream; revitalization of the former Hamm’s Brewery; and development along Payne Avenue and East Seventh Street that has helped grow commercial and retail jobs.

That’s progress to be proud of. Due attention to a neighborhood that needs it — and data-driven clarity about its challenges and assets as it faces the future — should help the East Side add to the list.

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